FOR THE PURPOSE OFCONTINUING THE
ADVANCEMENT OF LEGAL KNOWLEDGEAND AIDING THE IMPROVEMENT OF THE LAW

As has been previously annnounced on this page, the Ames Foundation has undertaken, in conjunction with the Harvard Law Library, a project to digitize the Library’s extensive collection of medieval manuscripts of English statute books and registers of writs. Some fifty-eight manuscripts are now available online. A listing of them with links their displays in the Harvard University Library’s system for display of digital material may be found here. The Foundation has also undertaken to catalogue these manuscripts. We are happy to announce that a preliminary catalogue, prepared by Charles Donahue, Jr. and Devon Coleman is now available. It contains extensive descriptions of fifty-seven of the manuscripts, with links to the images of the manuscripts themselves, summaries of the contents of the manuscripts, search engines, and the usual ‘front matter’. See the Table of Contents.

The Foundation has been working for some time on a Bio-Bibliographical Guide to Medieval and Early Modern Jurists. This Guide incorporates Kenneth Pennington’s Medieval and Early Modern Jurists: A Bio-Bibliographical Listing reformatted as a modern database and with the bibliographies considerably updated. It has been expanded to incorporate some civilians who were omitted from Pennington’s list, the principal focus of which was on canonists. All the manuscripts listed by Pennington are included, and there has been some updating here as well. There is much more to be done, but what we have is, we believe, worth presenting to the public. Gradually the authors that are in TUI 1584 will be brought into this guide.

The Foundation has also been working for some time on indexing and describing another large collection of material from the Harvard Law Library that have been digitized and placed online: two massive massive collections of printed treatises from the sixteenth century: the Tractatus ex variis iuris interpretibus collectorum (1549), published in Lyon, and the Tractatus Universi Iuris (1584–1586), published in Venice. Author files are now available for the first eight tomes of the latter, and author-title lists for the first eight tomes. See the Index of Contents.

The following digital publications (in many cases undertaken jointly with the Harvard Law School Library) do not, again for the most part, have complete metadata. We are working on it. The images are, however, in all cases, available for those who want to look at them and/or to try to find things in them on their own. In some cases, the metadata may be better than you expect.

The link here takes you directly to the Harvard University Library’s Page Delivery Service. All of them have sequence numbers for the images; some of them have folio numbers matched to the sequence numbers; the metadata for MS 189 and 220 are considerably better than that.